How Yahoo is no longer Delicious

[snowdarkred]

Watching the news about Delicious leak and the subsequent backlash – and the backlash to the backlash, and the backlash to that – the only conclusion I can come to is that Yahoo is run by idiots.

 

The number of bookmarks being saved per hour? Down. The number of new users? Down. The number of people switching to other, admittedly poorer services? Way up. All because Yahoo can't do PR for shit. True, Delicious isn't exactly a straight up profit house, but it does, or did, have consumer loyalty. Think of how many fandom people have been using it for years? How many times it's handed to fandom-newbies as the holy grail of fic indexing? How many people thank what ever deity they believe in that it exists because it makes life easier?

 

Yahoo leaked the “sunset” news – or, someone else leaked it, and then some higher up on twitter threatened to fire them in a tweet, which also isn't the best way to handle things, 'cause dude, it's not going to endear you to the public – and then refused to comment about except for some serious bullshit statement that said absolutely nothing, while simultaneously suggesting the worst. And then they were surprised at the backlash from millions of users who use Delicious for everything from work to fandom. They released a statement that blamed the media for distributing false information, when it was their own ineptitude that was leading people to draw their own conclusions. And then they just sort of handwaved it by implying that, well, no one was using Delicious anyway, so what did it matter?

 

Do you know how long it took Wikipedia to update the Delicious article to say that Delicious was shutting down? Like, two hours.

 

I love my Delicious account. It's my baby. I spent two weeks going through and standardizing my tagging system, and making sure that everything has a clear label. When my computer crashed a few months back, I lost everything that had been saved – my pictures, about half of my fics, and a whole lot of other stuff that was important to me. But what wasn't lost?

 

My fic bookmarks. My articles. My fashion links. My research – the same research that I used to figure out what the hell is up with my sexuality, or lack thereof. All of these things may not be things, they may not be physical, they may just be data, but they're important. I've been in fandom for years. I love it. It's what I grew up with, it's what help me discover who I am, it's what got me to start writing and never stop. And Delicious is important to fandom. It's another way for us to share in the epic love fest that is free-form fandom – the rush of excitement, the surge of pleasure in discovering new things, the ease of access to things that we're interested in.

 

And Yahoo threatened that. Whether the site shuts down Delicious, sells it, or whatever, I know I won't be able to trust them again. I can't. They obviously can't even manage themselves – how can I expect them to manage a simple website?


PS. I would love it if LiveJournal bought Delicious. I think it would be a good fit, though I'm not sure how that would work.
PPS. My trip to see my family didn't work out -- I couldn't go because of weather stuff. :( I've been using the past few days to panic over Delicious and read lots of Glee fic. I just need a chance to turn my brain off, you know? I feel like I'm always on on on, and I just need to power down and relax. Which I can't really do, because my boss is an idiot who doesn't know how to write a simple schedule, and that when I say, I can't work on Christmas Eve, it means I can't work on Christmas Eve. He also has the hots for my step-sister, but I don't want to think about that because it's icky and he's a creeper.

Comments

[jenna_marianne]

THIS THIS THIS. You've encapsulated my thoughts on yahoo & how they handled the situation and on delicious to a T.

I really hope a fan created site gets off the ground. I'm playing with pinboard and diigo, and have checked out AO3's bookmarking feature (but no imports as of yet), but nobody quite measures up to delicious. :(

[snowdarkred.livejournal.com]

Yahoo is a serious wreck right now. I mean - and I say this as someone who hates web advertising like crazy - if they have to stick a banner ad or two at the bottom in order to make money, well, they can do that. Seriously, millions of people, like 56 or something like that, have accounts on this website. Plus all the people who browse without opening an account. Think of how much ad money that is. If they were serious about saving it, they would. Anything else is bullshit.

I really do hope that we can get a clone, or that Yahoo will somehow be brainwashed into giving us an opensource version or something. That would be wonderful.

It's just, I have over two thousand bookmarks. Over a thousand of that is fic. A dozen or so is meta. Almost all of it is fandom. And I love every bit of it. I've made backups and stuff, but I can't save my tags with them, and I have over two hundred tags. I've been working on making my account accessible so that I can start pimping it on ficfinding comms. It may seem silly to some big exec who only cares about the bottom line, but these are fragments of my life we're talking about.

And, not gonna lie, I don't think I could stand it if I had something else taken away from me like this. :/

/over dramatic

But seriously, from a business standpoint...wow. It's like their PR department is asleep. Who the hell okay'd that asshole for a twitter account? I mean, isn't there company oversight on what their CEOs or whatever say publicly? *sigh*

[wordflake.livejournal.com]

Yahoo gives me a headache. I really don't want to get involved in the whole process because it's stupid, but I kind of have to because I love Delicious and want to know what's happening with it.

I'm gonna continue to use Delicious until something happens, but keep a backup at some other bookmarking-site in case the Yahoo-people get stupid for real and go all "Yay! Let's shut down Delicious like right NOW! :D" .

Tsk.

[snowdarkred.livejournal.com]

Yahoo makes me want to bang my head against a wall. *sigh* I'm backing up my bookmarks every other day or so, so I probably won't loose too much if they just suddenly take down the whole site, but fear is still there. :/

[jenna_marianne]

Yes, it's very perplexing that yahoo couldn't/wouldn't figure out how to make better use out of delicious. I'm also anti ad, but would put up with them. They could have done what other sites do, and have a free version with ads and a paid version with out ads. And I totally agree, yahoo did *terrible* with PR during this whole thing.

I've made backups and stuff, but I can't save my tags with them, and I have over two hundred tags.
If you use the export function in the delicious settings, it saves your bookmarks as a HTML file. As long as you have the "include my tags" and "include my notes" check boxes checked, it exports those too. I don't think the tags are visible when you open the HTML file, but if you import this file at another social bookmarking site like Pinboard (pay $~7 to sign up, very similar to delicious but less social) or Diigo (free, slightly different user interface) it does import the tags and notes.

If you're interested, I'm jenna_marianne on both sites. You can see if you like the way the sites look w/ fannish bookmarks:
http://www.diigo.com/user/jenna_marianne
http://pinboard.in/u:jenna_marianne

(FYI, diigo is really backed up with all the people trying to import delicious bookmarks, so if you do switch over it may take hours or more for your bookmarks to import. They're adding servers & stuff.)